Abstract
Intensified job demands (IJDs) originate in the general accelerated pace of society and ever-changing working conditions, which subject workers to increasing workloads and deadlines, constant planning and decision-making about one’s job and career, and the continual learning of new professional knowledge and skills. This study investigated how individual characteristics, namely negative and positive affectivity related to competence demands, and multitasking preference moderate the association between IJDs and cognitive stress symptoms among media workers (n = 833; 69% female, mean age 48 years). The results show that although IJDs were associated with higher cognitive stress symptoms at work, that is, difficulties in concentration, thinking clearly, decision-making, and memory, competence demands-related negative affectivity explained the most variance in cognitive stress symptoms. In addition, IJDs were more strongly associated with cognitive stress symptoms at work in individuals with high competence demand-related negative affectivity, and low multitasking preference (moderation effects). Altogether, the present findings suggest that HR practices or workplace interventions to ease employees’ negative affectivity from increasing competence demands at work could usefully support employees’ effective cognitive functioning when confronted with IJDs.
Highlights
Smooth information processing, that is, effective cognitive functioning, is required every day at work, especially for knowledge workers
We examined whether competence demands-related negative and positive affectivity on the one hand, and multitasking preference on the other, moderate the association between Intensified job demands (IJDs) and cognitive stress symptoms
IJDs induced by technological advances and digitalization are prevalent among white-collar workers (e.g., Mauno et al, 2020) and may overburden knowledge workers’ information processing capacity and lead to cognitive strain at work (Vuori et al, 2019; Kalakoski et al, 2020)
Summary
That is, effective cognitive functioning, is required every day at work, especially for knowledge workers. Using the framework for studying personality in the stress process (Bolger and Zuckerman, 1995), we examined the possible moderator role of media workers’ negative and positive affectivity related to competence demands, as well as multitasking preference, in the association between IJDs and cognitive stress symptoms. We performed five hierarchical moderated regression analyses In these analyses, cognitive stress symptoms were set as a dependent variable, background factors (gender, age, education, and weekly working hours) as control variables, each dimension of IJDs at a time as an independent variable, and individual characteristics (competence demandsrelated negative and positive affectivity and multitasking preference) as moderator variables. Background factors were entered at step 1 to control for their effects before each dimension of IJDs was entered to the model at step 2, to inspect their main effects on cognitive stress symptoms. At step 3, individual characteristics were entered, and interaction terms (that is, standardized individual characteristic multiplied by the standardized dimension of the IJDs in question) were entered at step 4 to investigate the moderation effects
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